Britain is facing calls to join Australian Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd in saying sorry to the stolen generations.

Prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC, says
Britain should endorse the apology to Australia's indigenous people
because it was behind the policies that led to thousands of
Aboriginal children being taken from their families.

Mr Robertson said Britain bore a "heavy historic responsibility"
for creating offices in Australia known as the Protector of
Aborigines, which removed children from their families between 1910
and the early 1970s.

The offices based their policies on the eugenics theories of
English academics and Fabian socialists who believed aboriginality
was a degenerate trait that should be bred out by removing
Aboriginal girls from their families and absorbing them into white
society.

Mr Robertson said he hoped the British Government would be
sympathetic to the Aboriginal families that had been devastated
after their children were removed and placed in orphanages,
internment camps and other institutions.

"It touches a nerve here, and I think it touches a guilty nerve,
and that's why I have spoken out," he said.

"The point I make in calling on the British Government to
endorse the apology is not only were the British responsible, for
example, in wiping out the Tasmanian Aborigines, which was the
worst form of genocide, but [so were] English intellectuals who
inspired the absorption and assimilation policies that led to the
stolen generation.

"The assimilation policy was well intentioned but it went
wrong.

"Britain has to share responsibly for the thinking behind the
stolen generation."

The calls by Mr Robertson, who grew up in Sydney and is now
based in London, came as hundreds of indigenous Australians flocked
to Canberra to witness Mr Rudd deliver the national apology in
Federal Parliament.

The 344-word apology, based on extensive consultation with
indigenous groups, apologises for the "profound grief, suffering
and loss" inflicted on the stolen generations.

Mr Robertson, who represented the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre in
its fight to stop London's Natural History Museum experimenting on
the skulls of Aborigines, said he believed there could be a case
for compensating the stolen generations.

"I think that certainly there's a case for those who have been
adversely affected and deprived of their natural families and had
their lives ruined ... but I will wait and see what Mr Rudd says,"
Mr Robertson said.

"[The apology] may be belated but at least it's being
offered.

"Whether it will be accepted is a big thing because I think the
victims have the right to accept it in their own time."

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